My son was born in 2012, triggering an abrupt realisation that I was going to die.
Not imminently - I was healthy and in my early-30s - but, when presented with that astonishing demonstration of the beginning of new life, I was forced to also recognise the inevitability of the end of life. That overall cycle became crystal clear.
As a child, I more-or-less assumed that I’d live forever.
In my 20s, it felt like I had all the time in the world, and that I could still be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do.
His birth was the additional context my brain needed to fully grasp the finite nature of human existence. I recognised that I’d already spent 32 years not being a writer.
I was never going to be an astronaut. I was never going to be a champion athlete. Some things were already beyond my grasp, and it was now too late.
This sensation of mortality has only intensified as I’ve broken into my 40s. I have an acute sense that everything I do could well be the last time I do it. Previously, if I visited a place there was always a part of my brain that assumed I’d go back some day. Now, I recognise that probably won’t happen. Every time I do something, or talk to someone, or go somewhere, it could be the last time I do so in my life.
Writing in public
There’s no time to lose, in other words. It’s no coincidence that I started writing more regularly when I was 351, experimenting with serial fiction and committing to a weekly publishing schedule. I’m now on my fourth novel-sized project, Tales from the Triverse, which I’m publishing via this newsletter.
There are clearly some people who are able to self-motivate without the pressure of time. It’s impressive! But I always work best with a deadline. That’s why serial fiction works so well for me, because it creates a firm, weekly promise to produce a new chapter - partly to my readers, mostly to myself.
Without the ability to publish chapters online, I’m not sure I’d ever have become a functioning writer. Working on manuscripts in private, on my own, waiting months or years to submit to agents, doesn’t work for my brain. I get distracted by shiny things, and my productivity is so sporadic it may as well be in reverse.
Balancing motivation and stress
The real trick, I find, is to generate enough pressure to get me back to the page, but without applying so much stress that I become creatively paralysed. I suspect everyone has a different sweet spot for this.
For me, it’s about having a small number of individual projects, even if those projects have quite tight timelines. Layer on too many projects at once and I start to feel my mind splintering in too many directions. I experience overload and make unwise decisions: “I can’t finish any of these tasks today, so I’m going to go play a video game for hours instead.”
That said, it’s also about practice and building a habit. I write and publish two newsletters each week - one fiction, and one non-fiction - and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible a couple of years ago. I’ve built up to it over many years.
One critical aspect, for me at least, is that these are not dangerous deadlines. If I didn’t publish a newsletter on a Monday or a Friday, I doubt many of my readers would actively miss it. It’s not like they have a shortage of great material to read instead. I’m not going to get fired if I don’t deliver. I take these deadlines very seriously, but missing them would primarily disappoint myself, rather than having any significant external impacts.
All that said, writing this newsletter is the first time I’ve had readers start to pay me for my writing.2 That I have paying subscribers is still incredible to me, but it also brings with it a new type of pressure. Back when I was writing on Wattpad, and before I had paid subscribers here, missing deadlines wasn’t a big deal for anyone except me. I was giving everything away for free, so it’s not like anyone was going to complain about having to wait a bit longer than usual.
Increasingly, as more generous paying subscribers join up, that relationship to my readers shifts. I have a real obligation to those paying subscribers. It’s a new kind of pressure, which so far has been quite low-key. In the early days I knew most of my subscribers personally, but that is no longer the case. Having paid subscribers formalises what I’m doing; it becomes a delivered ‘product’ in a way that it wasn’t before.
At the same time, every part of my creative brain resists the temptation to see this as ‘a business’. I never want the money to be my primary metric for success. So far, though, it is definitely a valid extra motivator - as well as being a signal that I’m doing something right.
Live long and prosper?
All this makes me think of science fiction and fantasy stories in which immortal beings express their envy at the short lifespans of humans. I never understood that when I was younger, but have come to realise that the ticking clock is indeed vital to my creative output.
It amazes me that significant figures in history often did so much so quickly. Alexander the Great died when he was 33. Humans didn’t live as long back then, so if you wanted to do something with your life you had to move even faster than you do today.
I didn’t start writing properly until I was 35. Alexander had already died by that point, having conquered countries and carved his name into the history books. It’s a good job I was born in the 20th century, given how much faffing about I did.3
This has clearly been on my mind. My latest story was ‘Immortality’ and explored a lot of these ideas in a fictional context.
I’d still like to live forever, but I don’t think I could do that and still be a writer.
What do you think? Are you someone who like to have defined deadlines? Or are you more like Douglas Adams, and love the sound of them as they fly by?
Related, this by
is a good read about long-term progress, and loops in some interesting facts about global life expectancy:It took a few years after my son’s birth, because the first couple of years we didn’t sleep at all. Writing required an increase in brain activity that only came with quiet nights.
I dabbled with Patreon and Ko-Fi back in the day, but neither of them went anywhere.
For the record, I’d also much rather be writing science fiction books than rampaging about waging war.
Deadlines are vital
Great post, Simon. You’ve perfectly encapsulated my drive to write and how I go about it. I often reflect on the Hamilton lyrics where they ask him why he writes likes he’s running out of time. It’s because we never know how much time we have!
As for the deadline thing, I work the same way. It has to be under some sort of pressure otherwise I never commit to it fully. Weekly is best for me because it allows edits and revision time.
Thanks for articulating this!!
What, no pitch?